Finally, the Travel Committee has replied to every request for sponsorship received (positives and negatives). So, if you have not received an email from us yet, do not hesitate in get in touch with us through the email or irc (#travel).

Sculpture of Juan Gantes masked (as Moonlight Mask :-)

We have booked 16 apartments at Catalina Park, which looks nice, in a good location and still austere. We were told they will enable a special room for attendants to the conference. The process of booking took more time than expected, but thanks to Jorge Bustos and Chema Casanova (who gave us a hand from Spain) it was possible to accelerate it.

We tried to sponsor as much contributors as possible, however it was not possible to sponsor everybody.

At the end, we received 51 applications, 3 of them arrived a bit later and other 3 very later. We have assigned assistantship to 43 people (travel and/or accommodation).

The Travel Committee is expected to reply every request for sponsorship in the next two weeks after the deadline. Because the original deadline was April 27, people who applied for sponsorship are worried because they do not have received any email coming from us yet (neither positive or negative).

Aserrín (Sawdust)

So, this is just an update of the GUADEC sponsorship process in order to let the people know in which part of the process we are. So, if you are waiting news from us, do not get nervous.

On Thursday 7, we replied to the sponsorship requests of the first group of people. This group was composed by people who have a work (talk) accepted to be presented at GUADEC. It was possible because it was a small group and we were sure we could cover their costs (mostly).

Besides, the Travel Committee is taking care of the accommodations. It let us to reduce and keep under control the costs, hence, we can support more people. And it will depend of the final place how many people we will be able to sponsor. We are delayed because the booking process has been slower than we expected. But we are working on it.

But I let you know we are prioritizing mainly as following: speakers (core, cross-desktop, normal, bof, lightning talk), foundation members, summer of code students, other people. There are other factors, such as, give the chance to people who were not sponsored the last year or people.

One thing is sure: if you were sponsored, you will not stay at Hotel Fataga. It is one of the most expensive hotels in the list and it is only our last resort.

The Travel Committee has received 48 sponsorship requests and we have started to processing them. It will be a bit hard, as you may guess and as you may deduce according the following tables:

General statitics

5

Females

43

Males

19

Speakers (not confirmed yet)

8

Google Summer of Code students

30

Members of GNOME Foundation

1

Applicant declined his request

Requests and funds (in US dollars)

Minimum requested:

$ 59,038.-

Maximum requested:

$ 61,101.-

Funds available for sponsoships:

$ 30,000.-

The amount requested should be a bit higher than it is shown in the second table, because we need to get some clarification from some people. However, I am confident we could save at least $ 9,000 if we look for a different lodging than the main one recommended by the organizers.

Sooner than later we should send emails asking for more information (when it were needed). We will do our best.

To everybody who have sent an application for travel & accomodation sponsorship:

If you did it before than April 27 02:00 UTC, I have sent an acknowledgment (email) confirming we (the Travel Committee) have received your request. If you have not received any acknowledgment coming from me, you should re-send your application.

The Travel Committee is receiving applications for travel sponsorship requests for the next GUADEC which will be held in Gran Canaria. The deadline is April 27, 2009, 19:00 UTC. Do no wait until the very last minute.

Read carefully the instructions and the proccess at the Travel’s page.

Passing from 5.8 MiB to 1.8 MiB, through deleting all those items whose files does not exists, seems a bit gain. I wanted to go a bit further and I wondered ¿How many recent files does an application really need? (sorry, not that futher :-) I do not think more than 10, but let me know if I am wrong.

I wrote my own version of <a href=”http://www.gnome.org/~csaavedra/news-2008-03.html#D23″>Claudio’s program</a> with considering that matter. And my ~/.recently-used.xbel file went from 1.2 MiB to 54 KiB. Before to go to the script, let me show the numbers I got in a computer with less than two month of non intensive use:

When I load Eog, it only show me the last 5 files I opened before. Why does it need 1146 extra items stored?

Nevermind. The <a href=”http://www.gnome.org/~gpoo/bag/clean-recently-used.py”>script</a> I wrote is simple. It delete the files that does not exists (the same strategy as Claudio’s program), but it also delete the files that are not so recently used, and I got the following numbers:

Thumbnails are created by applications and thanks to a proposed draft are shared among desktops. But, it doesnot mean that every thumbnail stored in your home directory is useful for the purpose they were created. Some of them points to a file that doesnot exists anymore, some of them are broken images, and some of them were created by applications that doesnot respect the proposed draft.

Basically there are two size of thumbnails: normal (128x128 pixels) and large (256x256 pixels). Each thumbnail must contains at least two pairs of key/value, one of them is the URI of the original file and the another one is the last time the file was modified.

To get the file name of a thumbnail a MD5 sum must be applied to its URI. If you move the file to a new location, then the name of the thumbnail must be updated (also its metadata).

When you delete a file through Nautilus, this file is moved to the Trash folder. Furthermore, its thumbnail must be updated. Nautilus does it right, which is good. But, when you expunge the Trash, only the original file is deleted, not the thumbnail; which is bad, but easy to fix.

On the other hand, when you rename a folder, the next time the folder will be visited (in this case under a new name), the thumbnails will be regenerated, because for each URI there is no a thumbnails associated. Now, you have two thumbnails stored for the same file, but only one is valid. If you repeat this step often, your .thumbnails filder will get polluted of useless thumbnails.

Instead of renaming the folder, you can create a new folder, then move the group of files there, and finally, delete the old one. In this case Nautilus will not regenerate the thumbnails, it will update the thumbnails correctly. At least in the first hiearchy (I have not test it deeply).

The worst case happens when the files are moved or deleted by a non free desktop compliant (or kind of compliant) application, let's say the shell. The thumbnails associated to those files will not be updated or deleted. (inotify to rescue?).

The average for a normal thumbnail is 25Kb of space while for a large one is 75Kb. If you maintain a lot of pictures in a long period of time (with all the file management involved), probably you have enough space wasted by useless thumbnails.

At least, I had. And I have the feeling that some other people, too. A time to live for thumbnails was requested, as is filed in bugzilla #150483.

Instead of delete my old thumbnails, I prefer to delete only the useless ones (in the sense of my first paragraph). So, I wrote a little script in Python (shorter than my comment) that estimate how much space I am wasting because of useless thumbnails.

After the success of "Code Monkey at Work", where Rupert was the young hero of the movie, Rupert was invited to participate in a cameo of "Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with geeks", a documentary film (idea of
Joel Spolsky) of the whole process to build
copilot (the simplest way to use VNC trhought a reflector; full of features with a simple user interface, and a better name).

Rupert in the documentary
(Rupert also appears in the trailer)

I just received my copy on Saturday 10 and I watched it the same afternoon. Interesting, even if you agree or not of what Joel
usually writes about software development.

Anyway, I thought Fog Creek was bigger than I realized it is; and I was not expecting their concerns about risks in their first days
(probably the same happened for Ximian, Fluendo and other related
companies).

A keynote of Joel Spolsky could be very interesting indeed. Or have
a short documentary of our community (we have the chance at GUADEC, Boston Summit, and so on).